Ãnand Gupta, a Ph.D. candidate in Dr. Diane Burgess’ laboratory, was recently awarded a 2019 International Pharmaceutical Excipients Council of the Americas Foundation (IPEC) award for graduate students. He was one of five Ph.D candidates nationally to receive the award.

The award was presented during the American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists conference in San Antonio on November 3, 2019.

“The pharmaceutical industry is notoriously wasteful, says Gupta. “Trade and Industry Development suggests that the losses run to $50 billion annually due to inefficient manufacturing processes. This especially adds to the cost of already extremely expensive anti-cancer drug products.”

To mitigate this, Gupta worked on developing and building a continuous processing platform to produce polymeric nanoparticles. Robust paclitaxel- loaded polymeric nanoparticles were developed through investigation of the raw materials and processing factors that govern the critical quality aspects of the final drug product. This process, put most simply, reduces wasted material.

The International Pharmaceutical Excipient Council of the Americas Foundation “sponsors up to five annual scholarships annually to acknowledge excellence in research conducted at graduate level in the field of excipients. The scholarships focus on recent significant contributions to formulation science and technology through innovative research with excipients.”

IPEC -Americas Foundation is the charitable arm of the International Pharmaceutical Excipients Council of the Americas.